A few weeks ago, I viewed a photo exhibit in the Tyler School of Art by a senior named Taylor Green. In a booklet she created, the process of moving out of her childhood home is shown as she prepared to move to Philadelphia from North Carolina to pursue her dreams of being a photographer. However, the sense of displacement she felt from this necessary painful abandonment of her childhood home created anxiety, depression, and a loss of stability.

When I read this booklet, I immediately thought of my own childhood home. The decrepit shack was not dependable at all. It was a factory-built house, made in 1958, toted on the back of a truck, and placed on the ground to feed the white flight to the suburbs after the Second World War.

We were not the first, but were the last, owners, and as the seemingly rapid movement from this small one floor home to an apartment, from one high school to another, from one community to another, took place, I found myself happy to have a nicer place to live. But I also sensed that same feeling of displacement that Taylor felt and assumedly continues to feel.

At first, it was a matter of making friends in a new school that felt most challenging. I figured that, if I could find a stable group of friends, perhaps the loneliness and loss of familiarity would dissipate. But, unfortunately, this wasn’t the problem. I ended up making friends, great ones too, but, to this day, the loss of stability haunts me.

For two and a half years I’ve called this apartment home, and yet I feel as though I am ready to pack up and leave at the slightest notice. I like being here; it’s a convenient location within walking distance to a great gym and a small shopping center as well as to the heart of Wayne, but the depressing nature of a seemingly temporary inhabitance has caused me stress.

My old shack was moldy, moisture clogged, dirty and dusty, with central air that was precarious in its workings, and long dead trees that loomed like ghostly guardians tired of their work, preparing to collapse their enormous branches at the smallest gust of wind or snowfall.

Sometimes, during hurricane-like weather, we would relocate temporarily to my aunt’s or father’s apartment to escape the possibility of being crushed (which I find a kind of dark humor in for some reason). Nevertheless, it was my home; I knew nothing else. From the time I was three I had lived there, making it thirteen or so years I had kept it as my residence. The hovel was filled with both good and bad memories, but it was my hovel. My home.

Even now while I write this I sit at a dining room table we bought at discount, and I sit on unfamiliar couches, and spend time in an unfamiliar room (my main residence, if truth be told). Some things came with us, like our trusty toaster oven, a few plates, cups, and dishes, my mattress that is almost as old as me, our television, a fax machine and a few other things.

But to me the bed is the one thing that is most foreign here, and yet so dear to me. Our shack was demolished to make way for the buyers’ new house. It is a giant, at least to me, dwarfing the other homes that had been there since I was tiny, and the only thing they seemed to have kept was the pool in the back that we could not afford to upkeep anymore.

They cut down the tired trees, save for one Japanese rose petal (from what I remember), that we saved from several mold and ant infestations (I still recall the massive exodus of the ants as my father sprayed them to death).

In Japan, objects that are over one hundred years old are usually destroyed for fear they will gain a spirit. This superstition seems to relate to the sense that many humans possess of objects carrying a distinct essence, which is why unwashed clothing or bodily wastes and fluids from a superstar, or even the concept of sentimental value, exist.

My bed, strangely enough, is my main comfort. It seems to carry the history of my life up to this point within every loose thread and creaky spring. It is one of the more permanent aspects of my life, and I find that I sleep well in it with a sense of my old home enshrouding me over my blanket, like a forcefield, a loving embrace that protects.

My life is good. I am well fed (which would be obvious to you if you saw me), well clothed, healthy, and feel financially stable, more or less. But my shelter has created a sense of impermanence that disturbs me on a deep level, that truly haunts me wherever I go, that emits an undercurrent of radiation that throws tantrums within me, and I continue to find my ultimate solace in my bed or outside my home in locations I am most familiar.

I hope that, one day, that sense of home will be regained, and I won’t have my essential items on standby at all times to leave this place. Call it pessimistic, but something tells me that that won’t happen for a long time.